Toll Brothers Brings Printing In-house

As a leading builder of luxury homes, Toll Brothers knows that just building a home isn’t enough. You have to sell it too. So the Horsham, Pa.-based firm keeps its marketing department very busy creating flyers, postcards and other glossy materials to promote its homes. Until recently, those materials were all printed by outside vendors. Then the company looked into the actual cost of outsourcing.

“We had been interested in having a print facility on site for a while,” says Sean Bornemann, director of creative services. “After we did a cost analysis and discovered what we could save, we knew it was the way to go. As a company, it just made sense to move from paying an outside vendor to paying ourselves.”

So the company installed a new Ricoh Pro C900, effectively creating a brand new in-plant. The ability of the machine to handle a variety of substrates and output full color at 90 pages per minute has been a big hit with the Toll Brothers marketing department.

“The Ricoh Pro C900 is an opportunity to supply four-color marketing materials at a reduced cost with quicker turnaround,” Bornemann says. “It’s our first step into production print, and we are very happy.”

The marketing team’s work includes 81⁄2x11? flyers, 6x9? postcards on 12-point coated stock and color invitations to promote visits to the homes. Those invitations used to be printed in one color due to cost concerns, but the C900 changed all that. The typical job has 80 to 90 percent coverage with full bleeds.

“With the Ricoh Pro C900, we have the flexibility to produce high-runs or as little as 250 cost-effectively—often pennies a piece. Because the large capacity paper trays implement air-assist feeding, they can run heavy, coated stock without jamming or slowdown, which is a huge benefit. And we can turn things around in a matter of days,” states Bornemann.

The shop has even printed advance runs of the company’s quarterly reports on the C900 while the bulk of the reports were being printed outside via offset.

Plans are in the works to incorporate more complex variable data into future mailings. The marketing department is excited about using Ricoh’s partner solution, Printable’s Fusion Pro variable data software, coupled with the Pro C900.

“We want to develop a postcard we can send directly to a prospective buyer on Monday with a picture of the exact house they were looking at over the weekend,” says Bornemann.